The Moz Blog

The Ask.com Commericals

Do you think they'll effectively brand Ask.com in the minds of consumers?

Do you think they'll increase traffic to the Ask domain?

Any idea what their media budget on those is? They seem fairly ubiquitous on primetime and cable channels.

My personal take is that they're engaging enough to get people thinking about search and about Ask, but they don't have the revolutionary push that would shift people's mindsets away from Google. I'm guessing that fewer than 5% of people who see the ads will try Ask.com. That may be enough, though.

The real issue here is that once you use Ask for general web search queries, I think you'll find a lot of dissapointment. Ask's strengths are in its additional features (the maps, the ability to switch to currency conversion or thesaurus or image search on the fly). The current algorithm for their results is good, but their crawl speed is dreadful. I see 2 year old pages in there and well linked, 6 month old pages missing all the time.

11 Comments

These ads remind me of the CareerBuilder.com campaign (http://www.careerbuilder.com/tv/) and another one for Telus, an ISP in Canada. Why the primate trend in technology advertising? I'd say the ad agencies are running short on ideas.

At first ... I liked the ad, BUT it will work if it's targeted towards people that are pretty savvy with search engines.
Unfortunately Ask.com made a mistake that many companies made before ... they didn't get out of their own box when creating the ad. In my opinion the ad is too technical for a "regular" person who uses search engines to find what they want and get out. I can even picture the way the drawing board was created. (our algo is better, give more results, tech stuff is good.....)
I think the ad worked better for people who work in this industry ... not for those that do not spend 8 hours on the engine.

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If I take off my black hat for a while and pull out the ol' MBA, I can reference back to some classes on advertising. Without getting into it, I saw several flaws:
1. The commercials take to long to identify what they are about (you can't brand a brand with little mindshare by only mentioning it at the end).
2. Most people don't see search as uncivilized; if anything, many are still uncertain of what to do (if we look at the phrases they type in -- advanced tools are rarely used).
3. More of a marketing issue, but did you even know the industry this was until it started showing the search engines? We're in the industry, so that's our first point of thought, but just showing a browser window isn't enough. Heck, even Pontiac is referencing search engines -- tis a medium.
4. Stop trying to copy Geiko Ask; you aren't that funny.
What would I have done with that budget? One thing I wouldn't have done is run TV commercials to gain search share. One unique method would be to...oh...I don't know...purchase web advertising! If they bought up a ton of Adwords / YPN for general, non-technical phrases, complete with dynamic landing pages, they'd have a better draw. Also, given that Dillar owns this now, why aren't they advertising more on internal web properties?
It almost makes me long for MSN's first page of sub-domain spam.
Cygnus

I liked the commercials and so did my wife we she saw them. We were watching a show together and when she saw the commercial she said "wow, that's cool".
I agree with you about being dissapointed once you try it out. After the commercial I tried using ask for a couple days but was very dissapointed with the results. Like you I noticed the old pages, etc.